In the basement of their flagship store in Manhattan’s Herald Square, Macy’s is running an experiment. One Below is a store focused on shoppers in their teens and twenties that the department store is using as a laboratory to figure out what the kids today like, and they plan to use what they learn there in their other stores across the country. Now they’re adding something new: a real-life Etsy store. [More]

While Etsy has long been a marketplace where sellers could launch small businesses, the site has not had a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding platform for sellers to raise money to grow their businesses. Today, Etsy announced it is finally giving crowd-sourced funding a shot with the launch of a new pilot program. [More]

Michaels, a store that sells craft supplies and random decorative crap, managed to become the only big-box craft store that sells kids’ current favorite craft/toy, the Rainbow Loom. Here’s the problem with having one hot product, though: it might boost a company’s sales and profits now, but how long will the trend last? [More]

You’ve probably never heard of Cody Foster & Company, even if you own items that came from them. They’re a wholesaler with no public-facing catalog. You have to be a small gift shop or large-ish chain like Anthropologie to even see their site. You can buy directly from the independent crafters and designers who claim that the company took their designs, mass-produced them in China, and sold them to retailers with no compensation to the original artists. [More]

With a pair of hands, some raw materials and imagination, you can make a lot of things you’d otherwise buy. Your do-it-yourself projects may or may not measure up in quality to manufactured goods, but at least you’ll know whom to complain to if you’re not satisfied.

Customers (myself included) on the email list of craft retailer Michaels received a message this morning with the subject line of “50% off your entire purchase – Friday only.” thought that perhaps the stakes had been raised in the ongoing coupon arms race between the big-box craft retailers. Alas, no.

If you have kids, you’re probably biting your nails down to the quick worrying how you’re going to find–much less pay for–this year’s super hot fad toy, Zhu Zhu the Robot Hamster. But don’t be so stupid! The thing about fad toys like Zhu Zhu is that they’re about 30% fun, 30% marketing, and 40% media hype. You can bypass all that nonsense and make your own in less than 20 minutes, and for a fraction of the cost.

If there’s one thing my grandmother and I agree on, aside from the fact that Marlena being possessed was a dumb storyline on Days of Our Lives, it’s that it makes no sense to pay top dollar for deliberately weakened/damaged denim. The ConsumerReports blog ShopSmart has found a website that offers tips on how to distress your jeans at home, like using a pumice stone to cut holes, or a cheese grater to create patterns.

If a Snuggie is just a blanket with sleeves, doesn’t it follow that as the crazed hybrid of a blanket and a sweater, it makes an ideal crochet project? One yarn manufacturer thinks so, and has released a free pattern which, coincidentally, requires at least $21 worth of their cheap acrylic yarn.

The only thing crazier than people involved with wedding planning are people in the scrapbooking supply industry, it seems. Weddingbee reports that an online craft supply store called Urban Expressions (not to be confused with the handbag company) completely lost it when an angry customer wrote in asking why they had neither shipped the item she’d bought nor specified otherwise as promised. Their response makes us understand why they chose the name “Urban Expressions” for their store.

Do you have a dozen or so unusable CDs or DVDs lying around, some glue and tools, and a burning need for a cool-looking iPod or iPhone dock? Geeky Gadgets can show you how to combine all of these things into a functional, and fashionably recycled, gadget.

Sure, you could cut up your credit and debit cards and throw them away once they’re closed, expired, or the account number has been stolen in a massive data breach. Or, with a few simple tools, you could re-purpose them into lovely pieces of jewelry.

Remember Vickie and her defective Delta Creative PermEnamel experience? It ruined several of her pieces, not because she applied it incorrectly but because something was wrong with the product. It happens sometimes with products, no big deal. What was a big deal was the company’s CEO, Bill George, refused to approve a compensation payment that his employees had already agreed to with Vickie, leaving her with no choice but to contact a lawyer and write to us. It looks like Delta Creative and the artist have now resolved the issue, and she’s sent us a statement saying everything has been resolved to her “complete satisfaction.”

I have used the Delta PermEnamel Products for several years with marvelous results. This was an isolated incident which I would not expect to recur. This isolated incident has been resolved to my complete satisfaction. Thank you, Delta Creative, Inc.

My friend and I used to pretend to be crafters, and we would email elaborately ridiculous project descriptions back and forth to each other as examples of that past time gone wild. Now we must put down our imaginary glue guns and denim swatches to pay homage to Pamela Cole Harris, who does this stuff for real. Below, see what happens when a kindly scrapbooker goes insane.

It’s your kid—you should get to decide what kinds of choking and lead poisoning hazards make up its playthings. One woman clearly didn’t need any Fisher-Price plastic toy kitchen ruining her white-on-white aesthetic, so she made her own entirely out of found corrugated cardboard, contact paper, and a few household items. And if you don’t feel you have the skills to replicate it by looking at the photographs, then she’ll sell you a copy of the plans for $7.